


when the bough breaks

by tomato_greens



Series: something incredible waiting to be known [4]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-27
Updated: 2011-03-27
Packaged: 2017-10-17 07:30:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/174384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Lila Jane Smith is thirteen, sick, and wishing she were somewhere else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when the bough breaks

**Author's Note:**

> If the sad parts of [all the pretty little horses](http://archiveofourown.org/works/171051) hadn't happened, this would be a timestamp of that hypothetical fic. Yeahhhhh IDK.

Lila Jane Smith is thirteen years old and absolutely miserable.

"But I'm sick," she wails. "I can't go to school. I'm dying!"

Her father looks at her with an eyebrow raised, appearing coolly uninterested. She scowls, not bothering to raise her own back––she can do it, but she doesn't look nearly as much like the dictator of a small country when she tries. "You don't look sick to me," he says. "But I suppose we can take your temperature if you'd like."

"Dad, that won't do anything," Lila says, "you know I never get a fever. I'm just sick."

Her father coughs to hide his smile. She scowls harder. "Well, let's do it just in case," he says, and goes to get the thermometer from its place of honor in the bathroom sink.

Lila, still in her pajamas, sits down on the living room couch, ready for a good sulk. "Eames wouldn't take my temperature," she calls. "He _trusts_ me.

"Well, Eames isn't here," her dad says from where he's clunking around in the bathroom. His voice carries through the kitchen and straight to her despite him never raising his voice. It's infuriating. "So I guess it's just you and me and my distrustful nature."

"This is ridiculous," Lila huffs.

"Mmm," her father says, coming into the room. "I quite agree. Open your mouth, please, under the tongue."

Lila rolls her eyes as hard as she can but complies, biting the stick end of the thermometer vengefully and pretending it's his finger.

He waits patiently and quietly, irritatingly unconcerned by her glare, until the thermometer beeps and she spits it out into his hand. "Ninety seven," he reads aloud, and looks down at her. "Not overly convincing, sweetheart."

"Ugh, don't call me that," Lila can't help but say, the frustration eating at her skin until she could burn up from it. "Who are you trying to be?"

Her dad crosses his arms, his only tell she can discern (and she only knows it because Eames told it to her, though that's neither here nor there). "I'm being no one and nothing but your father, Lila Jane Smith," he says quietly. "Now please get dressed before I have to do it for you myself."

Lila feels her face contort, but there's no use arguing. Her dad knows how to follow through with his threats.

She makes sure she stomps up the steps––not hard enough to be called on it, just enough to make her dad sigh. Serves him right.

She gets dressed slowly; she's achey all over, but she's mad enough now that she wouldn't stay home if somebody begged her to.

Well. Maybe if he _begged_ her. But not for anything less.

She clomps back downstairs, backpack in tow. Her dad hands her a plate with toast on it and points at the kitchen table. She sighs as unsubtly as she can.

"I know, breakfast with me is dreadfully dull, but you do what you have to," he says, setting a mug of tea next to her.

Lila makes a face at his back, then sips the tea. It tastes like the tea he always makes her when she's had a bad day, sweet and bright and hopeful, and feels good going down; she gets angrier––like an overfilled balloon, like she's going to burst with impotent rage. "I'm going to the bus stop," she says, chomping on the toast with her mouth open.

Her dad glances at the clock. "So early?" he asks. "All right. At least bring your scarf if you're not going to wear it."

"I'm al _ready_ sick," she says, "why do you even care?" and then curses herself for not thinking of something cutting and clever.

Her dad shrugs. "Who knows," he says, "it's a gift most parents share. All right, have you got everything?"

She nods reflexively before realizing how––how _patronizing_ he sounds. "I'm not a child, Dad, God," she says. Her head feels thick and stuffy, but she won't give in now.

"Sure," he agrees. "And yet you've forgotten your lunches how many times this year?"

Lila rolls her eyes and carefully doesn't bring up the talk she and Eames had had last month about body image. "Whatever," she says.

"Whatever," her dad repeats, smiling, and kisses her on the forehead right before she slams the door in his face.

Lila puts on the scarf once she's out of view of the house; it's cold outside and pride only counts when someone else is looking. She wishes her parents would buy her an iPod. She wishes she were old enough to have a job so she could buy her own iPod. She wishes she felt less like she were dying.

"If wishes were horses," she mutters to herself, then flushes hotly when she realizes she's not alone at the bus stop anymore. Fuck. She thinks it again, relishing the illicit spark the word releases along her neck hairs. _Fuck, fuck, fuck_.

She slips stepping onto the bus and mouths _Fuck_ without letting any air out; the bus driver looks at her suspiciously, but he can't do anything. She feels adult and confident for about thirty seconds before she sits down and the pain in her throat comes roaring back.

 _Fuck_ , she allows herself as the bus lurches forward.

-

By the time she gets to homeroom, she's exhausted. Her teeth hurt. There should be a _law_. She raises her hand when her name is called for attendance and stands up to pledge to the flag, but otherwise leaves her head on her arms. No one asks her if she's okay, and the last vestiges of the pleasure of martyrdom evaporate.

Her dad was probably popular in high school, Lila thinks poisonously. Eames definitely was. They don't remember what it's like, being thirteen and sick and hating everything.

Martha is waiting to ambush her at her locker as she picks up the morning's books and braces herself for first-period algebra. Lila stuffs her backpack inside as Martha immediately launches into a retelling of another episode of the Martha-and-Matti show, the back-and-forth will-they-won't-they for-God's-sake-it's-not-the-WB dramatic shitcycle that Martha insists on engaging in despite claiming that she knows better. Lila just thinks it's dumb he spells his name like a girl's, but she nods along.

"He's causing me all this _psychic pain_ ," Martha cries as Lila opens the door to her math class.

"Uh-huh," Lila says, and thinks, I need different people in my life.

The day drags on. By the end of third period she's gotten two suggestions that she go see the nurse after class and by lunchtime even Martha manages to drag herself out of her Matti-induced rage long enough to ask her if she's all right, which is how she knows it's time to go visit Mrs. Füker's First Aid Palace and Healing Paradise.

The line is about as long as it ever gets, and if Lila felt any less like small bombs were detonating in her sinus cavities and lining her throat and skull with shrapnel, she wouldn't be waiting here. As it is, she listens to complaints about sticky contacts, sneezing, dry lips, a migraine, a grotesquely heavy period, more sneezing, and Lee Erikson's really graphic description of his foot fungus before she reaches the open door facing Mrs. Füker's desk.

"Hi," she rasps.

"Hi yourself," Mrs. Füker says. She drops one of her ubiquitous hand wipes into the trash as she asks, "What can I do for you today?"

"I'm sick," Lila says, sniffing.

"Oh," Mrs. Füker says, with a look on her face like she's smelling some unnamed but horrific thing. "Well, let's take your temperature."

Lila stops herself from rolling her eyes but it's a close call. "I don't usually get fevers," she explains.

"Uh huh," says Mrs. Füker disinterestedly. "Open your mouth, under your tongue."

The déjà vu is dizzying.

The thermometer beeps and Mrs. Füker pulls it back out of Lila's mouth, raising her eyebrows. "A hundred and one," she says, lips twisted.

Oh. Maybe it wasn't the déjà vu.

"Does this mean I can go home?" Lila asks.

"This means you have to go home," Mrs. Füker answers. "Get in the other room and lie down, I'll call the number on your emergency card––is your mom or dad home?"

Lila's freezes, but she recovers enough to say, "Somebody should be, yeah."

"Good," Mrs. Füker says, folding a wipe in half to protect her fingers before she picks up the phone again.

Lila hustles into the cool darkness of the sick room and lies down on one of the cots.

"Hi," she hears faintly from Mrs. Füker's desk, "can I talk to Mr. or Mrs. Smith, please?"

She smiles to herself in the dark. Mrs. Smith. Eames'd like that one.

-

She wakes up to a gentle shaking on her shoulder.

"Huh?" she says, sleepy and disoriented.

"Hey, love," Eames says. "I came to get you."

"Daddy," she says, surprised. "You're back from your business trip?"

Eames pauses and blinks for a second before he smiles hugely at her, palms her feverish brow. "Yes, sweetheart, I'm back."

"Can we go home now, Eames?" she asks, more plaintive than she means to. It occurs to her that she'll have to walk through the school halls with him for everyone to see and she doesn't even care. She must really be ill, jeez. "I gotta tell Dad I told him I was sick."

"Sure, darling," he says, lifting her backpack like it doesn't weigh anything at all, helping her up, one hand a lifeline warm on the back of her neck. "You know I am always in favor of telling your dad when he's wrong. Sure."


End file.
